The Future of Web Design - What is DotNetNuke®?

 by: Lee Sykes

Have you discovered that within months your website becomes out of date and becomes a headache to maintain? DotNetNuke is the answer to your problems.

DotNetNuke® Overview

DotNetNuke® is a portal content management system (CMS) ideal for creating any type of website from commercial web sites, corporate intranets and extranets, online publishing portals, to a personal blog.

DotNetNuke® is provided free, as open-source software. It allows individuals to do whatever they wish with the application framework, both commercially and non-commercially.

The Static Website Problem

So you’ve created your static website using Dreamweaver, Frontpage, or programmed it manually in HTML?

Your next job is to promote your website and keep it up to date with lots of fresh content that the Search Engines love.

You soon discover that keeping your website up to date with the latest news and articles is a lot of work, within a few months your website becomes out of date and the site becomes a complete headache to maintain.

CMS – The Benefits

Using the DotNetNuke® Content Management system enables you to:

• Login to your website from anywhere in the world and update your content live

• Quickly and easily publish articles, images, documents, news, important information and more

• Save Money – Lower Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) you no longer need to pay a webmaster to maintain your site

• Support for an unlimited number of content contributors (ie. Give permission to members of staff to login and update certain sections of your website)

• Easily change the look of your entire web site with just one click using skins

• Extremely extensible admin interface to add and move content, panels and more.

• Security - Every element of your website can have specific security settings applied to allow or deny users from seeing, editing, or administering the different parts of your site

Once you have used DotNetNuke®, you will not look back - your old web design programmes will gather dust!

What do you need for DotNetNuke®?

To run DotNetNuke® you need to use a web hosting package that provides ASP.NET and a Microsoft SQL-Server database.

The DotNetNuke® Community

An advantage with DotNetNuke® being open-source software is the vast number of users out there. There are many developers contributing in the form of improving the DotNetNuke® core code and ‘modules’ which provide extra functions to your website, such as photo galleries. There are designers creating ‘skins’ which you can use to change the graphics of your website, and there is also a central forum area where you can ask DotNetNuke® related questions.

This community is rapidly growing by the day and it demonstrates how DotNetNuke® is the web of the future.

Where do you get DotNetNuke®?

You can download the DotNetNuke® code for free from: http://www.dotnetnuke.com simply register with the website to gain access to the downloads.

How do I learn DotNetNuke®?

There are many resources out there supplying documentation, videos and tips from installation and programming, to web design using DotNetNuke®.

You do not need to be a programmer to use DotNetNuke®; the hardest stage is installing DotNetNuke®. This is just a matter of uploading the correct files to your hosting provider and setting up your SQL database. DotNetNuke® will then automatically install when you open your website.

All you now have to do is add the content!

Beginner Resources

To see the functions of DotNetNuke® in action, there are two free beginners’ guides available from DNN Creative Magazine:

An Introduction to the principles of DotNetNuke®

http://www.dnncreative.com/Tutorials/IntroductiontotheprinciplesofDotNetNuke/tabid/75/Default.aspx

and

DotNetNuke® Quick Start Guide Video (25mins)

http://www.dnncreative.com/Tutorials/DotNetNukeQuickStartGuideVideo/tabid/73/Default.aspx